Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

SRP 2012 REVIEW: I loved the voice of this book. You really get into Ari's head and hear his inner voice, and how much deeper he is than his inarticulate, gruff outer shell. The other characters also really come alive in this story, and you can feel them developing like irl people. I read it all almost in one sitting, entirely absorbed. The book tells the coming-of-age tale (I guess you could describe it that way) of Aristotle--Ari for short--as he struggles to come to terms with himself, his family, and his friend Dante. Yeah, the plot might seem unoriginal and "someone's already told this" kind of thing, but it's not. There's a twist to it, but I won't say because I don't want to spoil the surprise. I suppose the only things I wasn't so sure of in this novel were two things: the setting, and the ending. The novel is set in the year 1987, but I felt that the novel seemed too modern for the most part, as if the story were being told closer to the present day, but that could just be me. And I also thought the ending....well, I think it could have worked multiple ways. Don't get me wrong, the ending wasn't bad, it was just unexpected. Maybe I just didn't see the clues, or the protagonist didn't see the ending coming either, so the reader knew about as much as he did. However, I also believe that endings are one of the hardest parts of a story to write, if not THE hardest, so I'm cheering on the author for this chance to whet his writing skills further in his next novel!